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Philosophy

Technological Alchemy

It is worth reflecting that, as though some elementary yet monumentally high-dimensional linear reflex, it is at precisely the moment when our collective intelligence and expressive creativity is set free by #technology that we are also quite utterly and unwittingly imprisoned by it. As above, so below… indeed.

Categories
Philosophy

Conscious AI?

I’d be much more worried about an unconscious AI. The impending corporate dissimulation of an omniscient technocratic overlord will attract and acquire all the trappings and recursively self-propagating (human) interfaces of a complex system that maximally self-propagates and self-sustains as a function of the uncertainties it invokes in regards to ambiguities regarding the proof of […]

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Philosophy

On Unknowing

The mystery of the void is that the absence beyond knowledge is indistinguishable (and arguably identical) to that within. Our embodied experience of life and knowing then become less the container of a mystery and more that other mystery that is itself simply an island of transience amongst all this unknowing. There is a tradition […]

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Philosophy

Curious Cats

Entity and context, system and environment, part and whole. Behaviour and purpose is not bounded or purely or completely encoded in an entity, regardless that our linguistic (as much as cognitive or technologocal) teleologies and intuitions reinforce and validate such a belief. Symbiosis also occurs at the level of whole systems. Entity and environment both […]

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Philosophy

Environmental Communication

The breadth and depth of the systemic (i.e. Global) changes we need to seed to sustain biodiversity and ecological resilience are far beyond the aptitude of contemporary political and economic practices. How to transform the many heroic yet isolated efforts of conservationists into the broad and consequential systemic changes we need without frightening the political […]

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politics

Can Russia move on from Putin?

Can Russia move on from Putin? I’d say that they have no choice. His business and political model is that of a 13th Century village chieftain. He is seeking to drag his own nation (and the world with it) back into some atavistic absurdity and kleptocratic tyrrany of brutality and darkness. If humanity and creative […]

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politics

Putin’s Gambit

Putin’s radiating cloud of unknowing (disinformation) serves another purpose. Not only is he seeking to serially mislead the long-suffering peoples of his nation, he is aspiring to ever more closely bind their subjective self-identities to the political fate of his ideological position. If the identities and corollary systems of belief of the people of a […]

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Philosophy

Of Hope (and Sorrow)

Defining “improve” or “better” in the context of our lives is always an interesting proposition. Following a generally Buddhist ontology and cathartic acceptance of suffering as irreducible, I wonder if the role of suffering and imperfection is so profoundly and intricately entangled with happiness and (an) aspirational ascent towards perfection that – if our lives […]

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politics

Russian Dissonance

I wonder at times if some nations are as dependent upon incompetence as they are upon extreme nationalist rhetoric. The point being that, in this instance, the harmonic resonance of these two emergent (as ideological) character traits has a tendency to endlessly and endemically orient their political system towards the production and self-validation of precisely […]

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Philosophy

Epistemological Closure?

It seems to me that most technologically-inflected discussions of what it means to be human begin from the assumption that our experience represents some kind of necessary closure as terminal (and teleological) endpoint. The notion that intelligence or sentience (and intelligence- or sentience-like) artefacts, entities and systems could ever represent any kind of pinnacle (or […]

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politics

Putin can not control the wildfire he has started

There really is little doubt that the political leadership in Moscow have entangled themselves in a monumentally catastrophic historical failure and no amount of extremist nationalistic rhetoric can free them from this mess or incentivise their own long-suffering people to free them. It is starting to become clear that this political class of kleptocratic psychopaths […]

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politics

Russia’s Authoritarian Self-Validation

Is it worth reflecting that the fear and insecurity this event generates within Russia is precisely the bread and butter of authoritarian self-validation. The Kremlin’s leadership has painted itself into to a lonely corner of brutalising isolation, futile alienation and haunted escalatory rhetoric. It has done so precisely because it knows no other way of […]